Evolutionary Techniques for the Nurse Scheduling Problem

Mehdi Sadeghilalimi, Malek Mouhoub, Aymen Ben Said

2024

Abstract

The Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem that creates weekly scheduling solutions for nurses. These solutions must satisfy constraints for the workload coverage requirements while optimizing one or more objectives related to hospital costs or nurses’ preferences. Although exact methods may be used to solve the NSP and return the optimal solution, they usually come with an exponential time cost. Therefore, approximate methods may be considered as they offer a good trade-off between the quality of the solution and the running time. In this context, we propose a solving method based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to solve the NSP. To evaluate the efficiency of our proposed method, we conducted experiments on various NSP instances. Further, we compared the quality of the returned solutions against solutions obtained from exact methods and metaheuristics. The experimental results reveal that our proposed method can fairly compete with B&B in terms of the quality of the solution while delivering the solutions in much faster running times.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Sadeghilalimi M., Mouhoub M. and Ben Said A. (2024). Evolutionary Techniques for the Nurse Scheduling Problem. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES; ISBN 978-989-758-681-1, SciTePress, pages 333-340. DOI: 10.5220/0012402300003639

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icores24,
author={Mehdi Sadeghilalimi and Malek Mouhoub and Aymen Ben Said},
title={Evolutionary Techniques for the Nurse Scheduling Problem},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES},
year={2024},
pages={333-340},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012402300003639},
isbn={978-989-758-681-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES
TI - Evolutionary Techniques for the Nurse Scheduling Problem
SN - 978-989-758-681-1
AU - Sadeghilalimi M.
AU - Mouhoub M.
AU - Ben Said A.
PY - 2024
SP - 333
EP - 340
DO - 10.5220/0012402300003639
PB - SciTePress